Where Is The Care in Health Care? Needed: The Art of Persuasion

How is it possible that the most obvious therapeutic modality, the human connection, accessed with the art of persuasion, has been replaced with such distance, calculation and regulation? It's the classic case of fear overwhelming reason. Medicine, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes, is a life-and-death business. It provokes fear at every turn by its very nature. Demanding patients, demanding family members, and the demands of the effort required to manage multiple people with multiple problems in the presence of multiple opportunities for real harm and damage have taken their toll.